Smatterers

    All smatterers are more brisk and pert
Than those that understand an art;
As little sparkles shine more bright
Than glowing coals, that give them light.

Samuel Butler

Samuel Butler was an iconoclastic Victorian-era writer whose works were characterized by their satirical wit and commentary on society. He is best known for his utopian novel "Erewhon" and the semi-autobiographical "The Way of All Flesh." Butler's interests ranged widely, encompassing art, literature, and evolutionary theory. He questioned established norms and traditions, often facing criticism for his views. Despite this, his work has endured and he remains a significant figure in English literature.

Samuel Butler

Religion Of Hudibras, The

Samuel Butler, Simple Poetry

Hypocrisy

Samuel Butler, Simple Poetry

English

Suggested Poems

Explore a curated selection of verses that share themes, styles, and emotional resonance with the poem you've just read.

Fill The Bumper Fair.

Fill the bumper fair!
    Every drop we sprinkle
O'er the brow of Care
    Smooths away a wrinkle.
Wit's electric flame
    Ne'er so swiftly passes,
As when thro' the frame
    It shoots from brimming glasses.
Fill the bumper fair!
    Every drop we sprinkle
O'er the brow of Care
    Smooths away a wrinkle.

Sages can, they say,
    Grasp the lightning's pinions,
And bring down its ray
    From the starred dominions:--
So we, Sages, sit,
    And, mid bumpers brightening,
From the Heaven of Wit
    Draw down all its lightning.

Wouldst thou know what first
    Made our souls inherit
This ennobling thirst
    For wine's celestial spirit?
It chanced upon that day,
    When, as bards inform us,
Prometheus...

Thomas Moore

The Puzzler

The Celt in all his variants from Builth to Ballyhoo,
His mental processes are plain, one knows what he will do,
And can logically predicate his finish by his start;
But the English, ah, the English!, they are quite a race apart.

Their psychology is bovine, their outlook crude and raw.
They abandon vital matters to be tickled with a straw;
But the straw that they were tickled with-the chaff that they were fed with,
They convert into a weaver's beam to break their foeman's head with.

For undemocratic reasons and for motives not of State,
They arrive at their conclusions, largely inarticulate.
Being void of self-expression they confide their views to none;
But sometimes in a smoking-room, one learns why things were done.

Yes, sometimes in a smoking-room, through c...

Rudyard

Forest Spittle

The preciseness of that little moment,
bowler eyes in hot, top rays
effervescent through
spongy forest gloom,
the wet of the happy
unreconciled with the dry outside.

Paul Cameron Brown

Contentment.

After The Manner Of Horace.



Friend, there be they on whom mishap
Or never or so rarely comes,
That, when they think thereof, they snap
Derisive thumbs:

And there be they who lightly lose
Their all, yet feel no aching void;
Should aught annoy them, they refuse
To be annoy'd:

And fain would I be e'en as these!
Life is with such all beer and skittles;
They are not difficult to please
About their victuals:

The trout, the grouse, the early pea,
By such, if there, are freely taken;
If not, they munch with equal glee
Their bit of bacon:

And when they wax a little gay
And chaff the public after luncheon,
If they're confronted with a stray
Policeman's truncheon,

They gaze thereat with outstretch'd...

Charles Stuart Calverley

Algernon Charles Swinburne.

Shrieks out of smoke, a flame of dung-straw fire
    That is not quenched but hath for only fruit
    What writhes and dies not in its rotten root:
Two things made flesh, the visible desire
To match in filth the skunk, the ape in ire, {87a}
    Mouthing before the mirrors with wild foot
    Beyond all feebler footprint of pursuit,
The perfect twanger of the Chinese lyre!
A heart with generous virtues run to seed
In vices making all a jumbled creed:
    A soul that knows not love nor trust nor shame,
But cuts itself with knives to bawl and bleed -
    If thou we've known of late, art still the same,
    What need, O soul, to sign thee with thy name?

Once on thy lips the golden-honeyed bees
    Settling made sweet the heart that was not strong,
    And sky...

Francis William Lauderdale Adams

Upon Spalt.

Of pushes Spalt has such a knotty race,
He needs a tucker for to burl his face.

Robert Herrick